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SURF Spin-Off Zensor receives additional support to ensure the future of infrastructure management

Thursday, 1 February, 2018 - 15:07

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The world of large investment projects will change radically in the coming years. The Brussels-based Scale-Up Zensor is providing high-tech tools for bringing back risks and operational costs in this sector. On January 25th it received additional funds from Innoviris to prepare a global roll-out of its technology.

Our world is increasingly challenged by energy scarcity, reduced availability of raw materials and pollution. To fight this threat, we need to radically change the way we manage our infrastructure. Still too often the structures we rely on for our transport, energy generation and production processes are poorly taken care of after they are constructed. This results in cracks, collapses, reduced energy production… In many cases the only economically viable choice left at this point is to tear down the asset and build a new one. As this construction process comes with an additional need for raw materials, transport of goods and energy, it is easy to see that it doesn’t represent a sustainable way of working at all.

The Brussels-based Scale-Up Zensor was established to fight this disease of our modern age. It provides owners of large and mission-critical assets such as wind turbines, bridges production sites… with an all-in-one tool for their lifecycle management. Bringing together the buzz of IoT and Big Data under one roof it provides sensors that are placed on the structure that communicate their data to a central ‘smart’ hub. The data collected is combined with operational parameters already available and translated into insights in the present and predictions on the future state of the asset. All these are made available to the owner in a tailored dashboard such that the operator has access to all information combined into a single tool.

CEO Yves Van Ingelgem: "The advance of technology, with today a focus on automation and artificial intelligence, is often seen as a threat to our prosperity. Within Zensor we challenge that view: through a clever combination of these concepts you can make our living environment safer and more sustainable. When we can predict that something will break down and at the same time say what you have to do to prevent it. Maintenance costs are reduced, our energy supply is more reliable and traffic jams through damage to bridges and tunnels can be prevented. "

This way of working is unique on a European scale and various studies, amongst others one ordered by the World Economic Forum, show that it can result in savings that exceed 25% of the total operational life on the structures it is applied on. Zensor has the ambition to become a dominant player in this field on a global level. Today the company is supplying its services to a large number international players, but an expansion plan is set forward. This plan is based on translating today’s service offering into ‘boxed’ product solutions that can be distributed in high numbers. To support the strategic plan behind, Zensor was awarded on January 25th a 500.000,00 € grant by the Brussels’ research Agency Innoviris.

CEO Yves Van Ingelgem "This support will allow us to get to the next level in our growth trajectory: an international Scale-up. In parallel with establishing our top-class team, a work in progress, we will now also be able to give our product business a flying start "